The life of the actor and director John Franklyn-Robbins, who has died aged 84, was devoted to the theatre. He was a prolific Shakespearean, with a prominent nose, small but expressive mouth and substantial mane of back-combed hair that gave him the appearance of a character man, alternating between the dignified and the mischievous. An important part of his armoury was his finely modulated voice; he was known to take an hour's breathing exercise each morning, before rehearsals.

Franklyn-Robbins was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and trained at Rada. Among his first engagements was directing open-air plays on a tour of Devon in the summer of 1952, and at the end of that year, he made his West End debut at Her Majesty's, in Mel Dinelli's The Man.

He was a proud product of the repertory system, particularly with the Manchester Library Theatre and the Bristol Old Vic. At Manchester from 1955 to 1961, he was seen in diverse roles from Ariel and Banquo to Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer and the inspector in Dial M For Murder. The Gentle Alliance, in which he played a milder variant of Angry Young Man, was televised by the BBC after its run in 1959.

Franklyn-Robbins's first Bristol season, in 1961, included playing Macduff to the Macbeth of Harry H Corbett. In 1963, he was a narrator in evening dress in War and Peace, which transferred to the Old Vic in London. He performed the same function in Granada's TV version in 1963, hailed by the critic Philip Purser as a "trail-blazing, Emmy-winning compendium of television techniques".

Franklyn-Robbins's television debut came at the end of ITV's first week on air, in The Haven (1955). During a Bristol season in January 1966, he could be seen in a half-hour BBC2 play, Four-Way Incident, and again the next day in Gordon of Khartoum, for the director Rudolph Cartier. Then, for Granada's The Stories of DH Lawrence, on the last day of the month, he narrated the first segment and appeared in the second. He was simultaneously filming The Quarry: Portrait of a Man as a Paralysed Artist, an early BBC work of John Boorman's.

Two West End plays, more than 40 years apart, found him involved in the Vatican, The Representative (Aldwych, 1963), set in the second world war, and in the role of Ottaviani in David Jones's production of The Last Confession (Theatre Royal, Haymarket, 2007).

His many radio plays included Return Visit (BBC Radio 4, 1977), in the role of a socialist pioneer who travels 50 years into the future. At the Royal Exchange, Manchester, in 1978, he supported Vanessa Redgrave, the lead in The Lady from the Sea, then did the same for her brother Corin as Coriolanus, at the Young Vic in 1989. For the RSC at Stratford in 1981, he played Dr Rank in Adrian Noble's A Doll's House and the King of France in Trevor Nunn's staging of All's Well that Ends Well. Both of these were seen again the following year, at the company's then new Barbican venue, and the second transferred to Broadway's Martin Beck Theatre in 1983. Again for Nunn, in 1982, he was Worcester to the Henry V of his former Bristol Old Vic colleague Patrick Stewart; they were reunited again in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1994).

The 1990s saw him entertaining New York audiences in a string of Broadway plays, for Tony Randall's National Actors Theatre, including Timon of Athens, Saint Joan, The Seagull and Three Men on a Horse. He also performed in Canada at the Stratford Theatre, Ontario, where he took parts in Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 1, Love's Labour's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing.

He continued to work with theatrical heavyweights, with a moving performance of Nonno in Anthony Page's 2005 Lyric Hammersmith production of The Night of the Iguana, and as Nestor in Peter Stein's 2006 RSC co-production of Trolius and Cressida for the Edinburgh International Festival.

After a debut in The Pumpkin Eater (1964), his film roles were infrequent, but had accelerated recently; Emma (1996), Mrs Dalloway (1997), Bright Young Things (2003) Vanity Fair (2004), Hogfather (2006) and The Golden Compass (2007). He can currently be seen in Is Anybody There? (2009), which stars Michael Caine.

Franklyn-Robbins is survived by a daughter.

Caroline Buddery writes: John Franklyn-Robbins lived with our family briefly in Great Yarmouth in 1951 before moving to London. He had begun his career in weekly rep at the town's Little Theatre, where he appeared in such perennial favourites as Rookery Nook, While Parents Sleep, the Winslow Boy and An Inspector Calls. Known to his friends as Chris, he was a keen disciple of Constantin Stanislavsky, whose book An Actor Prepares became his modus vivendi. He was an actor to his fingertips: those fortunate enough to have seen his performances will remember his wonderful voice and commanding presence, and in private he was as serious as he was charming.

• John Franklyn-Robbins, actor, born 14 December 1924; died 21 March 2009